Exceptionalism

Okay, we’ve established that a New Paradigm is well underway. But it’s still an unanswered question whether there will be a liveable Planet left by the time it takes center stage. The Nightly News gives us occasional glimpses of Reality, just enough to keep us believing that they’re on our side, rather than propaganda outlets for their Big Greed advertisers. We can align with our optimism and capacity for Miracles, and believe that somehow Humanity will get it together before it’s too late – it always has, right? Well, there was Rome, and Sumeria, and Atlantis, among the long list of “civilizations” that weren’t Sustainable.

The Alexanders and their spokespersons advise us to keep our focus on The Most Important Thing – namely What We Want. Which is good advice, that’s how we C0-Create it, we start with Attention. We definitely don’t want to align with our pessimism. On the other hand, what we Deny has a nasty habit of sneaking into the Unconscious and putting down roots there. It’s not good when that happens, because for almost all of us, the Unconscious has a lot more power over what we Manifest than our Attention does. You’d almost think if we Attended to our pessimism, then our optimism would sneak into the Unconscious and work its Magic! But like Eeyore, we’d probably go around not noticing that our glass was half full.

So I think it best to spend most of our time focused on the Future that we Want – but occasionally check in to see what’s really going on down on the street, away from our reverie. If nothing else, we might see someplace were we can help to move the Planet toward the Future that we Want. For instance, before we can Co-Create a Local Community and Economy, we need to stop giving our money to the Big Greed players that are destroying the Planet to serve their avarice.

So what follows is bummers. But Real. It will have to stop before we can Create a livable and Sustainable Planet. Shall we start with Monsanto?

Monsanto’s GMO Corn and Soy work by making the Corn or Soy immune to glyphosphate, a toxic chemical that kills almost everything else. By planting Monsanto Corn or Soy, a farmer can greatly increase the quantity of toxic glyphosphate that he or she pours into the environment, without hurting the crop. Hurting the neighbors’ crops is another story, but this is Capitalism, where whoever maximizes profit most while shunting damage to the neighbors, wins.

Well, plants aren’t as dumb as Monsanto makes them out to be. A few of the Weeds turn out not to be bothered by glyphosphate – so they thrive. So of course Roundup, the primary glyphosphate product, is doomed to eventually fail. What to do? Well, G-Engineer your Corn and Soy to make it immune to more powerful toxins! Like 2-4-D, a common carrier for Dioxin. Nobody lives around Dioxin. Not even you and I. Dow Chemical, furiously trying to outcompete Monsanto, is doing just that. Here’s the story on Dow’s efforts…

A lot of people are “blowing the whistle” on Fukushima, blaming it for all sorts of ills in the Pacific Ocean. Well, the bad news is that Fukushima was a drop in the bucket. Don’t get me wrong, Fukushima can still fairly easily degrade into Chernobyl’s big brother, but it hasn’t yet. Look at some of the problems that folks are blaming on Fukushima…

Stories like the last one make it look like the “First World” is victimized by poor regulation in the “Third World,” but that’s just more propaganda. Like the way Apple is victimized by those Chinese workers who commit suicide because their working conditions building your iPhones are so brutal. Poor Apple, victimized by those darn Chinese.

Even localized, Community-based Economies can have negative impacts if they’re conducted without considering how they fit into the larger ecosystem…

That doesn’t mean only large corporations have the wherewithal to “do it right” – some of them might, but when they’re profit-maximizers they probably won’t, if they can get away with shunting impact to others, especially small disorganized others. And it doesn’t mean that more regulation is needed. What’s needed is more education and more cooperation – potgrowers taking a turn at fishing, and fishers helping potgrowers find ways to prevent negative impacts. Adjacent Communities, especially upstream-downstream Communities, working together to find and propagate working solutions.

The main theme for the next couple of days is the Juno-Chiron Mjolnir built on a foundation of Lilith and Vesta-Ceres…

Bringing Miracle into Consciousness by Reframing our notions of what’s Sacred so these notions can become a stable foundation for a Sustainable Community that doesn’t depend on the Olde Male structures. We need foundations that are easily communicated, that make sense to most people, and that make it very clear that the Olde structures are not working.

Some researchers a while back alleged that “Conservatives” were as Compassionate as “Liberals,” but Conservatives had an unshakeable faith in Authority, while Liberals were more likely to trust their own views of the World. So as long as the Conservatives are taking their Authority hit from corporate-sponsored television, we’re screwed. We need a new Authority, one based on Cooperative Survival rather than screw-your-neighbor Survival. It’s starting to form, as more and more people are seeing how much damage the Tea Party, Climate Denial, and short-term profit maximizing are doing to Community and Livelihood.